Don't ask Faye Webster about her dog. She will only reveal his race off the record and is suspicious that the locals in her town have already learned too much. “My neighbors know his name/I thought it was weird, but I got over it,” she sings halfway through her fifth album, through the digital mask of a vocoder. Her protective impulses extend beyond her beloved pet. The Atlanta singer-songwriter finds ways to experience music away from the spotlight, dropping in unannounced as the bassist for local punks Upchuck and joining the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra at the last minute. the latter habit inspired the title of her latest record. On Overdressed in Concord, often steps away from the mic and lets her band, or occasionally just shut up, fill the void. It's a record about concealment—from disillusionment, from fame—that, whether through vocal processing or omission, conveniently hides Webster from view.
Webster began building a richer sound around her sweet, honeyed vocals on her 2022 EP Car treatment sessions, where she brought in a 20-piece orchestra to cover songs from her previous two albums. For Webster, the EP was a chance to lose herself in the music that swirled around her confessional songs: “I would just forget the lyrics or forget where I was because I was listening [the orchestra] play,” he said. But where that album emphasized the ethereal qualities of her songs, Overdressed in Concord emphasizes the naturalness of her songwriting, building melodies with a grand piano, a drum kit and an electric guitar.
Gone are the sweeping synths that provided a cushion for her brooding melody. this time, Webster leans into the acoustic sounds of a jam session. Her supporters – many of whom have been playing with her since her early years – step into the spotlight. On “Wanna Quit All the Time,” where she admits “it's the attention that freaks me out,” the yawning pedal steel and gleaming Fender Rhodes seem to speak for her. Here, as on the similarly impressionistic 'He Loves Me Yeah!', she brings in a new voice to further mask her own: the sound of Wilco's Nels Cline on guitar, elegantly soloing where another verse might otherwise go . “Lifetime” stretches the repetition of a phrase – “in a lifetime” – into something jazzy, Charles Garner's drumming keeping a leisurely beat as Nick Rosen's piano leads the song to its quiet end. As Webster says, he didn't want the song to end, so he asked Rosen to keep going through subtle chord changes. The extended coda lets her linger in the shadow of his piano a little longer, an audience in her own private symphony.
